died in a hospital in Ontario, in San Bernardino County, California, after a lengthy illness. Artistic education After an introduction from the billboard painter Bernardo "Barney" Sepulveda, Arny Karl entered the Hancock Park atelier of Theodore Lukits (1897–1992), the Lukits Academy, in 1968. At that time painters like R. H. Ives Gammell (1893–1981) in Boston and Lukits in Los Angeles were two of the few fine arts teachers whose instruction was based on the ideals and techniques of the 19th century French École des Beaux-Arts. This type of instruction is now known as the "Atelier Method." The Beaux-Arts method had evolved over hundreds of years from the Renaissance through the 19th century and was brought to perhaps its highest level of refinement by Parisian masters like William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904) and Leon Bonnat (1833–1922). Lukits, who had been teaching since 1924, was a respected California portrait, landscape and still life painter whose work was popular with the film community. He was an award-winning graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago where he had studied with a host of Parisian- and European-trained painters including Alphonse Mucha (1860–1939), Edmund H. Wuerpel (1866–1947), Edwin Blashfield (1848–1936), Karl Albert Buehr (1866–1952), Wellington J. Reynolds (1865–1949), Richard E. Miller (1875–1943), Charles Webster Hawthorne (1872–1930) and Robert Henri (1865–1929). Lukits passed on the accumulated knowledge he learned in his years at the Washington University School of Fine Arts, Chicago Academy of Fine Arts and the Art Institute of Chicago to his students, who began by "drawing from the antique" which meant doing charcoal or graphite portraits of marbles and plaster casts of ancient Roman and Greek statuary. These studies taught the students to understand "values" which are the tonal gradations of light and shadow, applicable to working under artificial lighting conditions in the studio or out of doors under the natural light of the sun or moon. Advancement in a traditional atelier is based on mastery rather than an artificial quarter or semester system, so Karl moved from working from plaster casts to simple still life set-ups only after his instructor was satisfied with his work. Eventually he began to work in color, painting still life set-ups under the colored lights that Lukits used to simulate conditions an artist would find out of doors. As the years passed under Lukits' guidance, Karl also began attending Lukits' anatomy and life drawing classes. Karl studied with